Ella Maud

by Nicholas Nicastro

  He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His steadfast love toward those who fear Him; as far as the east is from the west, so far does He remove our transgressions from us. As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear Him. For He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust…

  “Thank you for meeting with me today, Jim,” said Bickett.

  “It’s me who should be thanking you, sir.”

  The Governor collected his hat. “You’ll hear my decision before Christmas.”

  With that, he got back in his Oldsmobile and left. Jim returned to his paddle in the kitchen.

  The next day he was ordered to pack his things for transfer back to Raleigh. The consensus was that this news could be very good for Jim, or very bad. Having been denied twice before, Jim didn’t allow himself the luxury of hope. Instead, he drank in the light and the space of the world outside the train window, which seemed sweeter to him now than it did on the trip out.

  When Jim’s letter was reprinted in the papers, it was noted that this was the first time he had publicly denied his guilt, in his own voice.

  IV.

  On December 21, 1918, Jim Wilcox returned to his home town for the first time in sixteen years. The old Norfolk & Southern depot on Pennsylvania Avenue had closed several years earlier; he alighted on the platform of a new station on the city’s west side. The change disoriented him. He spent a while standing around the place, eying the brick exterior and sweeping tile roof. When he went inside, he found two handsome, wainscoted waiting rooms—one for whites, the other for blacks. It was a Saturday, mid-afternoon, and there were a fair number of holiday travelers rushing in and out. But he recognized no one, and no one seemed to recognize him.

  He was dressed in exactly the same clothes he had worn at both trials, and on the day he was remanded to Raleigh. He had five dollars in his pocket given to him by Hank Peoples. But he carried no luggage, and had no hat for his head. There was nothing in his prison cell he wanted to take away with him. He had come back with hardly more than he possessed when he was born, forty-two years earlier.

  There was only one place he could go, but he needed a drink first. He sighted a bar across the street from the depot. As he crossed, he was frozen by a motor car swerving from nowhere, rubber tires screeching.

  “Watch where you’re going, old timer!” the driver yelled.

  Jim didn’t move. The car steered around him, the driver shaking his head. Jim was surprised by how fast those things moved, without the tell-tale clip-clop of hooves his ears were attuned to.

  He came in and ordered a beer. The barkeep eyed him as he jerked the tap, appraising his suit.

  “Just outta the hoosegow?”

  “How could you tell?”

  He smiled. “Just a lucky guess. That’ll be two bits.”

  “What if I’m not done?”

  “We pay as we go here.”

  Jim downed half his mug and glowered. He had come back to Elizabeth City without much thought of whether it was a good idea. To spend his first holidays as a free man with his surviving family just seemed like what he was supposed to do. He felt he should put more effort into envisioning a future for himself—maybe a fresh start up in Norfolk, or Baltimore, or New York. Someplace with the kind of dock-work he was used to. He remembered his time in Manhattan with Nell, gallivanting the shops in his yellow suit. The memory gave him a flush of pleasure—or was it the beer working on him? For he was a lightweight now.

  “You take to the water sometimes?” he asked the barkeep.

  “Now and again.”

  “Ben Shrive still set around here?”

  “Sorry, can’t say I know him.”

  “Len Owens? The Pastoreski brothers?”

  The other shook his head. Jim drained his glass and pushed it across.

  “Set me up again, doc.”

  “Jim Wilcox,” someone said.

  Jim turned. There was a man sitting three stools away, dressed in flannel shirt and suspenders. There was an empty mug in front of him, and a spittoon on the floor by his side.

  “Do I know you, friend?”

  The man turned. It was dark, but neither the gloom nor the passage of time prevented Jim from sensing something familiar about him.

  “Yeah, you seen me,” the man said. “I was on the jury.”

  “Oh,” said Jim, turning back to his drink. “Well, no hard feelings.”

  The man fetched up a laugh, then loosed a bolus of black juice into the spittoon.

  “I wouldn’t think so. I argued for you for twenty-four straight hours. Wasn’t for me, they would have convicted you in fifteen minutes.”

  “You don’t say. What’s your name?”

  “No need to know my name.”

  From across the street, there was a long whistle as the train pulled out.

  “Well, thank you for the attempt. Can I buy you a drink?”

  “You know, I always liked the figure you cut, Jim. I never thought they had you right, saying the things they did. But can you take a piece of advice?”

  “Sure.”

  “Get the hell out of town. Nothing’s going to end well for you here.”

  After the man had gone, Jim finished his second beer. He had a mind to have another, but thought the better of showing up pie-eyed at his sister’s.

  When he stood up, the barkeep tossed his quarter back at him.

  “I wasn’t around here back then, so I didn’t know it was you,” he said. “I won’t take your money—and not because I like you.”

  “Thanks for the hospitality.”

  Tottering out, Jim left the coin.

  Annie Mae and her family lived in a little white frame house at 157 Baxter St., less than a mile from the train station. Knocking on the door, he met his brother-in-law for the first time.

  “You Jim?”

  “The very one,” he replied.

  “Sam Williams.”

  They shook hands, Jim withstanding his scrutiny.

  “Got’ny bags?”

  “I am as you see.”

  Annie Mae appeared out of the darkness beyond, an expression of ecstatic torment on her face. They embraced. The way she hung onto him threatened to wring tears from him, so he backed up a bit, grasping her shoulders. His little sister was a full-grown woman now, in her mid-thirties, of mature girth and worry lines. The scar she had gotten from Tarheel was fainter, but still puckered the flesh of her cheek. The way she beamed, covering him in filial devotion, made him uneasy.

  “You’re home now,” she said.

  “I believe I am.”

  “Come on in. We’re about to start dinner.”

  Over roast chicken and potatoes, he met his niece and nephews: Oscar, 12; Betsy, 10; Samuel Hallett, 7; and Samuel Howland, 6. Both the younger boys were named after elders in their father’s family. Having never had the opportunity to visit him in prison, the children stared at him in unabashed fascination. He didn’t know how much their parents had told them about his past. Very likely nothing, he thought—though they could just as well have learned the story from their friends and neighbors. In any case, he chose to portray himself as a long-lost but entirely legitimate uncle, who simply happened to live far away.

  Their father, meanwhile, was wary. His manner—cordial enough but no more—left no doubt about the real depth of his welcome.

  “Did you come down on the 630?” asked young Oscar.

  “I arrived more like 3 o’clock.”

  The boys laughed out loud.

  “We don’t mean what time. We mean what engine!”

  “Oh, forgive me, fellas. I didn’t notice the locomotive.”

  “It is true you had a falcon when you were a boy?”

  “And is it true it attacked Mama?” said Samuel Hallett.

  “Boys! Mind your manners!” cried Annie. “Please excuse them, Uncle Jim. They sp
eak out of turn.”

  “’Tsall right. And in answer to your questions, yes, both are facts.”

  The boys looked at each other as if both had won a bet.

  “Tell us!” they said in unison.

  “Boys, please—”

  “Annie, it’s fine. Of course I’m happy to tell it, though I warn you it’s not a story that ends happy…”

  And so he told the whole tale of Tarheel, from the excitement of the early days when she first arrived to her unfortunate end. The children, from the youngest to the eldest, hung on every word. When he got to the part when their mother was cut, Samuel Hallett asked her, “Why’d you do that, Maw?” To which his mother replied, “Because I was a naughty child, just like you!”

  “Paw, can we get a falcon?” asked Oscar. “Promise I won’t be careless.”

  “Positively not,” said Sam Williams.

  “Any ideas where you might settle? Got a job lined up?”

  “To be entirely honest, the last few days have felt like a whirlwind. But I think I’ll look for something local.”

  “So you’re coming back here?”

  “Thought I might.”

  Williams glanced at Annie.

  “Well that’s splendid,” she said. “We’ll get to see you more often! Now when’s the last time you had a good home-baked pie?”

  That night, Jim slept in an ordinary bedroom, in a bed with carved headboard and softly laundered sheets, for the first time in almost twenty years. This simple luxury had seemed so unattainable for so long he had scarcely allowed himself to envision it. But now that it had become real, a strange thought went through his head: the way the bedclothes enfolded him was alien. The quiet of the house, without the sounds of sleeping men around him, was troubling. In some fashion he could not understand, he felt none of it was for him.

  He hung around Annie Mae’s through Christmas. Having no money he couldn’t share in the gift-giving, but he did take the boys out to the river to look at the boats. Hayman’s, he noted, was still there. But there seemed fewer fishing boats, and a general air of dilapidation. A number of the city’s industries, Sam Williams explained, had moved inland, where the rail connections were better. Many of the jobs had gone with them.

  It occurred to him that it had been ages since he’d shucked an oyster. He led the boys to the closest bar he could find—a good fifteen-minute walk—and sat them down on a bench.

  “Name your pleasure, men. The Moses Pond? Topsail? Confederate Dollar?”

  Oscar and the Samuelses pulled coordinated scowls.

  “No?” said Jim. “I was handling my own knife when I was no older than two. That was about average for an Elizabeth City boy…”

  He ordered a half-dozen, which arrived in a tin plate, recumbent on ice and already open. When he saw the boys looking dubiously at the soft brown contents, he seized one and showed them how it was done.

  “These are some beauties here. When they were this color we used to call ‘em Black Mammie’s Cootch—but don’t tell your mama I said that. So you take ‘em by the shell here, and you put on your pleasure in condiments. I like tomato ketchup. But you can use pepper sauce or just lemon…”

  He applied a dab of sauce and tilted the shell into his mouth. This one was sweet, and yielding, like it had never known a serious tide in its life. The pure concentrated essence of his childhood.

  “…and you make sure to get all the liquor, because that’s where the flavor is.”

  But much as he coaxed and cajoled, he couldn’t make either boy partake. The best Oscar did was test an oyster with the tip of his tongue.

  “Ugh, salty!” he exclaimed.

  “They look like boogers,” observed Samuel Howland.

  “Well, I guess that means more for me,” said Jim, and tugged the plate toward him.

  They went out to the tracks to watch the trains. The boys knew all the locomotives, and could hold forth on the characters of each. They walked the siding and picked up chunks of coal to throw around, spiking each other with soot, until their talk petered out and all of them suddenly seemed nervous.

  “So is it true you went up the river for a long time?” asked Samuel Hallett.

  “Shut yer yap, stupid!” said Oscar.

  “Goodness, where’d you learn a saying like ‘up the river’?” Jim shook his head.

  “I’m awful sorry my brother got such a big mouth, Uncle Jim.”

  “Not to worry, son. Where’d you hear a story like that, anyway?”

  “Our paw says you went away for killing your girl, years and years ago,” said Samuel Howland. “My maw tells him to shut up about it, it ain’t true. So who’s right?”

  And Jim thought: there it is.

  “I guess you can say they’re both right. My girl died, and I did get punished for it, for a long time. But I didn’t do it. I’ve never lifted my hand at a woman in my life.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Samuel Hallett, full of confidence.

  The day Jim left, Annie Mae gave him a napkin tied up with an apple and a few sandwiches. When she pressed him to stay, he professed excitement at making his own way again.

  “So you really are determined to stay in town?” she asked.

  “I’m a regular bad penny. You can’t get rid of me.”

  “Oh Jim, I wish you wouldn’t talk that way.”

  They embraced on the front porch. Then Jim shook the hands of all the Williams boys.

  “Come back anytime,” said his brother-in-law, his eyes flashing “Never dare.”

  “I will,” replied Jim, intending not.

  There was a rooming house by the docks that offered beds for ten cents a night. As he had only two dollars and twelve cents left of Hank Peoples’ money, he decided to economize by sleeping outside unless it was well and truly cold.

  The hay in any quiet barn was plenty warm, even when it was thirty degrees at night. He got comfortable doing this, rising before the owners came to tend their livestock. He bought a little breakfast—a roll or biscuit and some coffee—then went around town looking for odd jobs. He spent the first days of 1919 filling wheelbarrows with coal, collecting scrap iron, and mucking stalls. One of his easier gigs was sweeping up beard trimmings from the floor of a barber shop. That one didn’t last as long as he would have liked.

  By week’s end, when he truly stank from the work and the manure of his quarters, he would splurge on an afternoon at the bathhouse. After soaking, he would look at the stick-thin figure in the mirror, and almost recognize the dude he used to be. He thought about visiting some of the cathouses. But then he would cough up his usual tablespoon of blood in his kerchief, and lose all inclination for such things.

  Instead, he made the rounds of the drinking houses. Sixteen years of forced sobriety made him a quick drunk, plastered good after just three or four shots of watered-down rotgut. This went easy on his pocketbook. But he needed more than that to drive away the memories. He is fired by Tom Hayman, again and again. The judge trains that death sentence down on him, and strings of spit trellis the sidewalk at his feet. He and Nell walk arm-in-arm on a floor made of light. He gives her a topsail, and she downs the oyster with no need of a napkin, her blue eyes oceanic and engulfing.

  Three months of this life and his purse still had less than three dollars in it. His visits to the bathhouse became less frequent, because there was drinking to be done. Once the most hated man in Pasquotank County, Jim became the most pitied. Citizens who had been in the crowds calling for his death looked upon him now, and declared “Sad how they treated old Jim Wilcox, wasn’t it?”

  “They convicted him just on the circumstances,” others would say.

  “Plain destroyed his poor family.”

  “Don’t you just know that William Cropsey had somethin’ to do with it?”

  “That Yankee Jezebel wasn’t innocent.”

  Now and then, he ran into people he once knew. Len Owens was still in town, retired from the river trade and manning the counter at a h
ardware. Just to prove there was no hard feelings, Jim went in and shook his hand, and Len looked about as sad as a widower. They spoke vaguely of a drink they never intended to have.

  One day, toward spring, he saw Ed Aydlett walking down the other side of Main Street. In the years Jim was away, his former counselor had become something of a political force in the town. Jim was inclined to make greetings, until he saw Aydlett—the man who had defended him twice, with a passion that verged on tears—sink his head into his collar and walk faster. Jim obliged by pretending not to see him.

  He was aware of the absurdity of his decision to stay on in Betsy City. Common sense, and the looks in every eye he passed, all told him that he needed to quit the place, to start over in a town without so many ghosts. But when the world gave him a nudge, Jim Wilcox was inclined to shove back. Common sense once told him to forget about the Cropsey girls, when they disparaged him. He was innocent, after all, so why should he give up the only place he had known his whole life? William Cropsey was the outsider, not Jim. Why didn’t he leave town instead—and take his damnable clan with him?

  It took until summer for Jim to get his first real job. Jerome Flora, who was a decorated veteran and much respected in town, was Fire Chief. Elizabeth City’s fire company was largely volunteer, but there were two full-time positions at the station house behind City Hall. He offered one of the positions to Jim.

  Jim took up his responsibilities as firefighter with the same seriousness he did as a model prisoner. He got a bunk on the second floor of the firehouse and a locker for what little stuff he had. He made the bed with military precision every morning, and kept its environs spotless. He took the care and polishing of the fire engines to new levels of fussiness. The boys in the fire company knew his history, and knew he liked a nip now and then, but they followed Jerry Flora’s lead in giving him the benefit of the doubt.

  The ritual of turning out was his favorite part of the job. The preparations, the urgency, the call to action at any hour of any day—these combined to give him a sense of importance he had missed. The heading out into the streets, with any number of possibilities waiting for them at their destination. Traffic parted for them as they careened and clanged; children gazed up to him on his gleaming perch, clad in his watertight armor, and begged him to ring the bell.